VISIT/GS: Higher Level Grid Services for Scientific Collaborative Online Visualization and Steering in UNICORE Grids

Many production Grid infrastructures such as DEISA, EGEE, or TeraGrid have begun to offer services to endusers that include access to computational resources. The major goal of these infrastructures is to facilitate the routine interaction of scientists and their workflows with advanced tools and seamless access to computational resources via Grid middleware systems such as UNICORE, gLite or Globus Toolkits. While UNICORE 5 is used in production Grids since several years, recently an early prototype of the new Web services-based UNICORE 6 became available that will be continuously improved in the next months for its use in production. In absence of a widely accepted framework for visualization and steering, the new UNICORE 6 Grid middleware provides not such a higher level service by default. This motivates this contribution to support e-Scientists in upcoming WS-based UNICORE Grids with visualization and steering techniques. In this paper we present the augmentation of the early standards-based UNICORE 6 prototype with a higher-level service for collaborative online visualization and steering. It describes the seamless integration of this service within UNICORE Grids by retaining the convenient single sign-on feature.